The Adventures of Team Parker

Okay, so I’ve been getting complaints about my lack of updatage. In my defence I had made jetlag — Tuesday night Sameer and I only got to bed around midnight and then we woke up again at 16:00. We slept for 16 hours straight! And then we still felt tired. Then last night we couldn’t fall asleep until like 2am and then I was awake again at like 6:20am. Today we spent most of the day with Ferzana — it was her birthday — and you know, just to keep it real and make her feel like she was “home” again, I fell asleep on a couch in Cafe Nero in the middle of a conversation. Woke up when I started to feel the drool dripping down my cheek. But I was a trooper. I wiped it off and went back to sleep again.

Anyway, San Francisco. Okay between the jetlag and the laziness and watching Doctor Who (woo-hoo!) and also telling all my San Francisco stories to people verbally, I just haven’t gotten around to it. Well, anyway, here it is.

We arrived and got to the hotel pretty easily. Took a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train and then according to Google’s travel plan, we were supposed to take a trolley to our hotel but when we got to that leg, I saw that it was about $11 for the trolley and there was an insanely long queue to get on. I suggested we ask where the street our hotel was on was, and it turned out it was only four blocks over, so we just walked.

Anyway, we got there, yay and what. It was right near Union Square which is like a touristy area so great and what. But my main complaint is that all the hotels that cost slightly more charge for internet — it’s so pathetic! The cheapo hotels always offer free internet and at first I was like, “What gives?” and then I figured it out. If you’re looking for cheap hotels, free internet and free breakfast are differentiators when you compare hotels but if you’re looking for hotels that are one price bracket up, then they take for granted that they can charge for internet and breakfast and you will just pay it because feel it’s essential. Anyway, I think that sucks and in fact Sameer and I have actually just decided it’s probably better to stay at cheaper hotels anyway. As long as the area is okay and the room and bathroom are clean, and there’s free internet then yay.

What now? Oh, the first day we went to Chinatown which was really interesting. We wandered around and went into loads of shops that sold all sorts of Chinese clothing and curios and whatnots and food and it was all generally great. Also, there were some temples just plugged in between the other buildings and those were interesting.

We went into the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie company which pretty much invented fortune cookies as we know them (you know the ones you get with your meal at any random Chinese food place) and the place is still exactly where it originally was and operates in pretty much the same way. You can get fresh, warm fortune cookies in either regular or chocolate flavors (yum!) or you can write your own fortunes and have them put inside a cookie for you.

And we also ran into some kind of festive thingy. Not entirely sure what it was but there was drumming and dancing and dragons and what, something to do with a restaurant that had some special guests there.

Anyway, the next day Sameer had to go to mosque for Jumuah so we took it easy in the morning and then he took a walk three streets over to the mosque. Anyway, the whole time he was gone, I was kind of worried about him. I kept thinking “Oh my goodness, I should have walked him to the mosque.” Anyway, he comes back to the hotel a couple hours later and he has this traumatised look on his face. Apparently he walked through the dodgiest area to get to the mosque. There were bergies all over the place, two guys fighting, one oke throwing a garbage can at someone and shouting “leave me alone”, some gangsta looking dude walking around with a rolley bag and surreptitiously taking money from people and handing out little baggies, some man saying to some skanky looking chick “Let’s just go into that alley.” I am not making this shit up — for real! My poor husband, he was totally traumatised.

Anyway, that wasn’t even the worst of it. Our guidebook suggested a walk through Golden Gate Park and well, let’s just say that was a whole ‘nother story! We got there, it was like bergie central, so dodge we freaked out and decided to walk in the direction of the young, hipster looking people we saw on the hill. We get there and these kids are dressed kinda grungily with tattoos and piercings and okay I can deal with that, no big deal. But then suddenly a car comes screeching up along a pedestrian footpath and two guys jump out of a car and they grab this kid and push him up against the car and start frisking him and we realize they’re undercover cops. So before things get really rough we skedaddled outa there.

After that we made our way to the Japanese Tea Garden which was really quiet pretty and peaceful and we sort of forgot about our prior angst.

That wasn’t even the end of it. The next day was the Fourth of July. Problem is, San Francisco is notorious for it’s fogginess. (Of course we didn’t know this until we got there.) So we’re expecting this great fireworks show but it’s so foggy all you can see is bright colors somewhere in the distance, no detail, just loud explosions and some flashes like lightning on a cloudy night. Anyway, then everyone was mauling to get on the busses. So like, people crammed onto this bus, there were like 100 people on a bus that usually only takes about 36 people. So I get on and I’m squeezed up in the aisle and I hear this voice behind me saying “Get your ass out of ma fuckin face” Double-take. There’s a girl behind me scowling. So I say “Sorry, there’s a lot of people getting on the bus,” and she says “I don’ give a fuck!” Okay, so then I realized maybe I shouldn’t be messing with this girl. Then she started calling out to her friends “Are you here? Did you get a seat?” And then for the next twenty minutes or so she and her four friends who were scattered around the back of the bus had a conversation that went pretty much like this (no exaggeration):

Hey bitch, you here?
- Fuck you bitch!
Don’t call me bitch, bitch!
- Fuck you, I got your man’s dick!
You leave my baby daddy alone, bitch!
- I can have his dick anytime I want!
I’m still on his dick, fuck you bitch!

And then, any time someone tried to move towards an exit on the bus and pushed up towards the girl that was next to me (it was hard not to push people around what with the bus being so full), she’d go “Get out of my face bitch” and if you said “Sorry” or “Excuse me, I’m trying to get off the bus” it was “I don’t give a fuck!”

Everyone else started to get really pissed off with them but nobody wanted to antagonize them. You could see the drawn expressions on people’s faces, people rolling their eyes or trying not to make eye contact with these girls. Then, after like twenty minutes of continuous shouting and cussing, someone asked one of the girls to get off the bus because everyone else was tired of listening to their shit and suddenly some large guy with a deep voice got up and said “Who’s talking shit about my bitch? I will throw you off this fucking bus! Who was that?!”

Okay, and then I started to fear for my life. I thought “Lord, if someone pulls a piece let it get me instead of Sameer.”

Then the guy who made the comment started saying some crazy things and somehow defused the situation. But then the girls started Fing and Bing all over again and eventually an older gentleman who was at the back of the bus spoke up in a very calm, commanding voice asking if they would please keep quiet. One of the girls asked if he was dying and he said, yes in fact he was, he didn’t have many more years left. Then they all quietened down except for the girl that was next to me, who said (what else?) “I don’t give a fuck.”

Anyway, we got off that bus as soon as we got within walking range of our hotel and walked really fast to the lobby doors. I told Sameer that I actually felt sad for those girls because my god, is that really all they have to contribute? Did they actually think they were being cool or something? And he said he thought they all looked like their eyes were glazed over and maybe they were on tik.

Anyway, we were pretty happy to be leaving San Francisco after that. The dodgiest city we had been in, in the entire United States.

Okay, I almost forgot. Other interesting stuff. We had breakfast at Lori’s Diner every morning. I wanted pancakes. They have the fluffiest, lightest, yummiest pancakes. Also, who can resist eating in a 50’s style diner while listening to Elvis and Del Shannon.

And then while we were wandering around on the Fourth of July, we came across a true-to-life for real lemonade stand, run by a brother and sister, aged about 6 and 8. So we had to buy some just for the experience and the kid pours me some lemonade, then he looks in the glass and goes “There’s something in it,” then he sticks his finger in it to get it out, then he decides “Oh, it’s nothing, I think it was just ice. You try it and if there’s anything wrong with it, I’ll give you another one.” Seriously, I had to hold myself in, I just didn’t want to laugh at the serious little salesman.

Anyway, we just took the lemonade and drank it. Not like we’ve never had kids stick their fingers in our food before anyway. And might I just add, the lemonade was great — sweet, sour and icy as lemonade should be. A bargain at 50c.

And yup, this time that really was everything about San Francisco.